Miller and J. D. McDonald

Miller and J.D. McDonald are connected by the trade that first makes Butcher’s Crossing prosperous and then leaves both men stranded: Miller hunts the bison, while McDonald buys, processes, and sells the hides. Their relationship shifts from parallel participation in a rapidly exhausting resource economy to a specific agreement that neither can fulfill as expected. When the market collapses during Miller’s absence in the mountains, the promised price becomes impossible to collect, and the hides themselves end in flames.

Shared Ground in the Hide Trade

Four years before their final confrontation, Miller and McDonald arrived in Butcher’s Crossing in the same year. Miller remembers a landscape then crowded with bison: hunters could bring back a thousand or fifteen hundred animals in a fortnight, and the spring hides were especially valuable. By the time he tells the story, the herds have contracted to small bands, a successful hunt yields only a few hundred animals, and he expects Kansas to be hunted out within another year or two. Their business relationship is therefore rooted in a trade already consuming the resource on which it depends.

McDonald operates as a buyer and processor rather than as a hunter. He purchases hides brought in by others, tans them himself, and sells them wholesale to Saint Louis. His workload gives a measure of the trade’s scale: he says he handled nearly one hundred thousand hides the previous year and expects two or three times that amount in the current one. The paperwork has accumulated badly enough that he offers Andrews clerical work, explaining that the business is expanding faster than he can keep up with its records.

Miller draws a sharp distinction between his own independence and McDonald’s system of organized expeditions. McDonald sends thirty or forty parties around the country and pays fifty cents per head for raw summer hides, which Miller characterizes as thin and relatively low-value. In his account, the hunters bear the work while McDonald gathers the hides and controls their sale; Miller says he hunts for himself or does not hunt at all. This difference does not prevent a later transaction between them, but it establishes that Miller is not simply one of McDonald’s hired hunters.

The Agreement and the Delay

The practical connection takes shape when Miller reports that McDonald will buy the expedition’s hides, sparing the hunters the journey to Ellsworth. The proposed price is four dollars apiece for winter hides, and McDonald already has a buyer in the East. Miller has not yet settled the arrangement with Schneider, so he brings the terms to the group for discussion rather than presenting the purchase as a completed deal. The offer links a hunt in the mountains to a distant market through a local buyer who promises to take the hides and arrange their sale.

When Miller returns, he insists that the agreement was for four dollars per winter hide. He and his companions have three thousand prime hides stored in the mountains, a stock he values at more than ten thousand dollars even after transport costs. But the return comes seven months later than expected. McDonald acknowledges that the bargain existed; he does not deny the price or pretend that Miller misunderstood him. His answer is instead that the circumstances that made payment possible have vanished while Miller was away.

A Market Reversal

McDonald says the market has collapsed and that the buffalo-hide trade is finished. The hides he bought and paid for the previous autumn—thirty or forty thousand of them—have consumed all his money. He offers them to Miller for ten cents apiece, a fraction of the price promised for Miller’s winter hides, and says they may be worth selling again only years later. The contrast between the two prices makes the reversal tangible: hides once worth several dollars cannot now be readily converted into cash, and the buyer who had agreed to purchase more is himself unable to meet his obligation.

McDonald explains the change by comparing buffalo hides with beaver pelts. When beaver hats went out of fashion, buyers stopped wanting the skins; he believes the same unpredictable shift in demand has overtaken buffalo fur. The hides have not ceased to exist, but their value in the market has. Even the railway, which McDonald had expected to make the land valuable, is being laid fifty miles to the north. Meanwhile, hunters are selling bison meat to the railway company and leaving the hides to rot where the animals were skinned. The trade’s failure thus exposes a broken chain between killing, processing, transport, and buyers: abundant slaughter no longer guarantees a sale, and the meat gains a use that the hides have lost.

Contract, Ownership, and Rupture

Miller refuses to accept the market’s verdict as a release from the bargain. He says he will enforce their agreement and threatens to take the hides to Ellsworth when McDonald insists that no buyer there will want them. McDonald counters that Miller is seven months too late: had he returned on schedule, the money would still have been available, but the delay has helped bring about McDonald’s ruin. The exchange gives each man a different measure of obligation. Miller points to the agreed price and the labor required to obtain the hides; McDonald points to insolvency and to a market no longer able to turn those hides into payment.

The disagreement finally separates legal or commercial value from possession. McDonald offers Miller his land, but the gesture does not restore the failed transaction. When Miller burns the hides, McDonald runs toward the fire, and Andrews stops him before he reaches it. McDonald’s response is that their worthlessness does not make them cease to be his. Miller continues loading the hides and driving the wagons into the blaze for nearly an hour, while McDonald watches. The fire destroys the stock rather than returning it to the market, and the once-promised exchange ends not in payment but in the destruction of what each man understands differently: Miller destroys the failed proceeds of his hunt; McDonald sees his property being consumed.

Significance of the Relationship

Their rupture condenses the novel’s economic reversal into a personal encounter. The agreement initially seems to make the hunt’s success legible as money: three thousand hides, a fixed price, and an eastern buyer. Yet each link proves unstable. The expedition is delayed, demand disappears, McDonald’s earlier purchases exhaust his funds, and transportation or a more distant buyer cannot restore the bargain. Miller’s confidence in the contract collides with a market that has ceased to recognize the commodity’s former value.

Neither man’s position resolves the conflict. McDonald admits the agreement but cannot pay; Miller has secured the hides but cannot make their promised price real. The final fire strips away the distinction between merchandise and physical property without reconciling them. Their business relationship ends with the hides still McDonald’s in his understanding and still Miller’s failed payment in Miller’s, while the flames make both claims materially irreversible.